Do Overs

It was July 10th, 1983, at Comiskey Park, and the Brewers vs. the WhiteSoxs game was at 1:30 pm, a Sunday game. My wife Kathy and I had driven down from our home in Central Wisconsin on Saturday afternoon to visit her parents in Chicago, which meant four things: music, good food, drinks, and baseball. I’m sure Saturday night we went somewhere downtown Chicago to hear some blues with her parents, but I don’t recall who or where, but Sunday was the real draw for me as they had tickets to the Sox’s Brewers game. The Seats they had landed were the best seats I have ever had at a Major League game. Right behind The visitors’ dugout. We sat and could put our feet on the back of the dugout
Bob and Gladys loved music,  drink, and baseball. To give you an idea of how addicted they were to the Cubs and WhiteSoxs, they would record games during the season and watch them during the long winter with no baseball. I would catch them yelling at the TV at times as if they could change the outcome of a game that had been played months earlier.
We arrived at Comiskey early so my mother-in-law could watch batting practice. She always said that’s when you see the players at their best, interacting with each other and just letting go. I believe she was addicted to the sound of the ball on the bat. You know that crack sound during batting practice is a constant. So we are in the Comiskey 2 hours early for the first pitch, and the seats are fricking amazing. You can hear the players in the dugout, and My Father in Law wasted no time getting himself organized with his Beer, pencil ready, and score card, but best of all, two bags of peanuts in the shell and the space below his seat that the hundreds of shells would occupy.
Ninety-five degrees in the sun, with no shade except our ball caps. The cold beer was the most satisfying. The shells from the peanuts seemed to be accumulating rapidly between the four of us. A few hot dogs came our way also just because. The heat was getting to the players also because the dugout emptied three times during those nine innings with a brush back, then a dinged batter and the best was Jim Gantner and the manager of the Sox going toe-toe-to-toe with no blows. Still, their teams were pushing and shoving, and the name-calling was unique. My father-in-law would launch a peanut once in a while over the top of the dugout, but not enough to cause any commotion. I was convinced he might get the boot as he never held back, calling the umpire a bum or choice words for poor play or an error. We lasted the whole nine innings, four hours and eleven minutes, and that was a new record for the length of a nine-inning game in the American League. The record has been broken since then.
The Sox won, and my mother-in-law was happy. Kathy and I were sunburned and worn out from the beer and heat. My father-in-law stood up, shouted at the Umpire leaving, then stuck his hand in his pocket and stated that he had lost his car keys. We all dived down through the millions of peanut shells, knowing that they had to be in there someplace. Another 40 minutes of looking in the seats and talking with lost and found. Nothing. There are no keys anywhere. So my father-in-law would call his brother Buck, and he would pick us up. So we began our walk outside towards the 1980 Chevrolet Chevette in the Stadium parking lot, and what seemed a bit odd was that there were six security guards around the only car in the lot. We got closer, and one of the Guards said in the great Chicago accent, “We made a bet on how long the vehicle was going to run till the gas ran out. “ My father-in-law commented in the same tone as he called the umpire a bum for the seven and half hours his car ran, and we watched baseball. Play Ball!